Just when we thought reading multiple double-digit page count terms of service was bad enough, this madlad takes it to the next level with a 277 page legal opinion.
What a time to be alive!
Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
191–200 of 761 posts
Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
#192I expect this to be bad for everyone except Google if the ruling holds. Why? Mozilla and Apple will lose significant revenue from having Google as the default search engine and Google will no longer have to pay those billions. What's more, no one else can pay to be the default either (eg the short-lived Mozilla Bing deal). So what's going to happen? Most users will probably still use Google, nobody is getting paid an…
Google seemed to think the many billions of dollars spent annually to insert Google into other products was necessary in order to maintain dominance in the search market. This wasn't disputed right? I doubt they are relieved now that Bing, OpenAI and others have charismatic products that appear to threaten their core competency right as the business is declared a monopoly.
>in order to maintain dominance in the s̶e̶a̶r̶c̶h̶ ̶m̶a̶r̶k̶e̶t̶....
...advertising market, i.e. selling the users of search to advertisers
Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
#193I expect this to be bad for everyone except Google if the ruling holds. Why? Mozilla and Apple will lose significant revenue from having Google as the default search engine and Google will no longer have to pay those billions. What's more, no one else can pay to be the default either (eg the short-lived Mozilla Bing deal). So what's going to happen? Most users will probably still use Google, nobody is getting paid an…
It's like you didn't understand what this case was about at all. Google isn't paying to be first, Google is paying so nobody bothers making a competitor .
people keep bothering to make competitors, they simply have no chance at success having kept getting locked out by Google's anticompetitive practices
Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Thunderbird, on the other hand, takes user donations. And it depends on Firefox, sadly.
Do you mean it depends on Firefox for money and staff from Mozilla inc/fdn? Or that it uses a Firefox-based browser engine for HTML emails? If the latter, I don’t imagine this will have too terribly much impact. Email clients often lag behind browsers in what they can display.
It's not just the "rendering engine" it's the entire software stack from down at the bottom with the IO and networking libraries to mid-layers of JS and core rendering, to very top with the UI toolkit. There's not much in Thunderbird that isn't Firefox and it's almost all custom Mozilla code, about 20 million lines of it, and not heavily reliant on major OS libs like so many other large-scale apps.
Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
For those disagreeing, the power of defaults is incredibly powerful , most users are blissfully unaware on how to, or why they might want to change them. Sure, plenty will change it back, but many won't. We've seen this play out with Apple Maps already — Something that may get Apple in trouble too. Remember that Google was paying Apple 20 BILLION for the privilege, and a key reason they had an antitrust case against…
No, defaults aren't incredibly powerful. Chrome utterly dominates Edge on Windows, despite Edge being default. How do you explain that? The reality is that people know what they like, and most will switch to the thing they like most. Especially when it costs nothing.
Defaults are incredibly powerful, Safari and Edge are the second and third most popular browsers next to Chrome. Chrome itself is a default on a lot of android devices. Speaking of android devices, Samsung Internet is 4th/5th most popular as it comes default on Samsung devices.
To say defaults don't matter because Chrome is used on Windows is a bit absurd. Chrome in 2012-2014 was still trading blows with IE even after the tremendous shortcomings during the Windows 8 and 8.1 era. This was a time when everyone was telling people to not use IE, and yet it retained ~20% use. Nothing like now where Chrome dominates ~70%.
Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disagree. People use Google because it's the default, not because they will go out of their way to keep using it. The minute Apple changes the iPhone default, all but a few iPhone users stop using Google.
Perhaps, but it's worth noting that Chrome became the dominant browser on Windows even though Internet Explorer/Edge is the default browser and comes preinstalled.
Because it was helped by already nearly ubiquitous Google search shoving it down everyone's throat on every page
And then ubiquitous Youtube dealing the killing blow: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/ex-youtube-engineer-...
Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
For those disagreeing, the power of defaults is incredibly powerful , most users are blissfully unaware on how to, or why they might want to change them. Sure, plenty will change it back, but many won't. We've seen this play out with Apple Maps already — Something that may get Apple in trouble too. Remember that Google was paying Apple 20 BILLION for the privilege, and a key reason they had an antitrust case against…
No, defaults aren't incredibly powerful. Chrome utterly dominates Edge on Windows, despite Edge being default. How do you explain that? The reality is that people know what they like, and most will switch to the thing they like most. Especially when it costs nothing.
Google: Hands 20 billion to Apple to keep defaults to Google.
You: No, defaults aren't incredibly powerful.
Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no excuse for not making search engine management as simple and flexible as Firefox does, especially on the desktop, but I appreciate the hoops you jump through to keep hacks available for browsers with less user choice.
Firefox makes you jump through hoops too. To enable the UI for adding custom search engines you need to set the undocumented preference "browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh" to true.
At least on mobile Firefox for Android, that's not true. It's there by default.
Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firefox makes you jump through hoops too. To enable the UI for adding custom search engines you need to set the undocumented preference "browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh" to true.
If I was a government party with subpoena power I'd be really interested in the email chain around that decision.
The code review comments indicate they had an in-person meeting: https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D86987
(My impression is that the feature is hidden behind a setting because it's half-baked and not yet ready to replace opensearchdescription xml, add-ons, and bookmark keywords as the official way to add search engines.)
Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
$20 billion in 2022 according to the verge via court docs: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/2/24147007/google-paid-apple...
No, absolutely not -- that says nothing whatsoever about making the default difficult to change. It's just about what the default is .
That last part requires a nudge and a wink, just like those OEMs who didn't "need" to make it annoying as fuck to turn off secure boot under the terms of their contract with Microsoft but did it anyway because they knew what was good for them.